A kindly look thanked her from the old castellan’s keen eyes.
“But I thought it ill to depart without visiting Sister Agnes, the holiest of them all; and I craved such comfort as she could best bestow, for my heart was exceeding heavy. So I hied me up to her cell in the rock.”
Here she paused a moment, while her three nephews (who sat a little below her, in order of age) bent forward in silent attention. None of the three, however, ventured to speak, for in that age it would have been the worst possible presumption for any young man (especially if not yet made a knight) to join unasked in the talk of his elders; and the youths had seen enough of their good uncle’s surprising readiness with his hands in such cases, to find in it an effectual curb to their natural forwardness.
“Ere I passed the threshold,” went on the lady, “she called me by name, and bade me enter. As I did so, she rose from her stony seat, and took me by the hand (the like did she not for the Duchess of Brittany herself) and said, more blithely than she was ever wont to speak, ‘Welcome, thou favoured of Heaven! I am sent unto thee with glad tidings. Go tell thy lord to cease his murmuring against God for sending him a son like Bertrand; for lo! that same Bertrand shall yet be the glory of his house, and of the whole realm of France!’”
“What? what?” cried the baron, excitedly; “said she, ‘the whole realm of France’?”
“That did she,” said his wife, in a voice trembling with emotion; “those were her very words!”
The hearers exchanged looks of speechless amazement.
“And as she spake—whether it was but the echoes that answered her, or a choir of unseen angels sent to guard the holy place—methought I heard many voices repeat her words: ‘The glory of his house, and of the whole realm of France!’”
She ceased, and hid her face in her hands as if overcome by emotion.
Such prophecies were then matter of implicit faith; and those of Sister Agnes, in particular, were famed through all Brittany for their exact and often immediate fulfilment. Hence neither Bertrand’s scornful father, his desponding mother, nor his sneering cousins (utterly astounded though they all were by this prediction) had a doubt that this clumsy, ill-favoured lad of whom they were so ashamed was destined to rise above them all; but how, no one could imagine.